A mediocre game with a good finish

Sunday's Brier final was one of the poorest games I saw this week at the Brier. Joel and I had tickets from Thursday morning on - and also went to the Monday morning draw, and I watched some on tv too.

Both finalists - Kevin Martin's team from Alberta and Glenn Howard's Ontario team - had played much better in earlier games. Martin's rink had been unstoppable all week, going undefeated, although they did look human in their playoff game against Saskatchewan (a game the Sask boys should have won). But on Sunday they were far from their best.

The story was the same with Howard, who was the defending champion. Some of the players on the teams had been playing at 90% accuracy or more during the week, and it's hard to play at that high a level for a whole week. Sadly, they hadn't saved their best for last.

But they were equal in being off their game, so the game was close, but also a low scoring affair with only 9 points in total put up on the board. Each team only got a deuce - 2 points in an end - once. Howard's two point end came in the 9th to tie the game.

But that gave Martin the hammer - last rock - in the last end, and he made good use of it by drawing the four foot to score a tie-breaking point and win the 2008 Canadian Curling Championship, a.k.a. the Tim Horton's Brier.

It was a good shot, and classic finish to what was an otherwise less than classic game.

I'm happy I went to some of the games. One of the remarkable things about them was how fast the ice is. It's as if the ice was like glass. If I was throwing the weight that these players used for some of their take out shots on my draws at the Grain Exchange (where I curl mixed), I'd be hogging my shots (not even getting them in play). And their draw weight is even lower than the take out weight. Unbelievable.

They can throw the rock but do they know the game?

I've been at the Brier the last few days. The top teams are really good, but yesterday and today Pat Simmons's rink from Saskatchewan showed some strategic shortcomings that led to their downfall.

Yesterday in the 1-2 playoff game - the winner to advance to the finals, with the loser to today's semi-final - they called the wrong strategy in each of the last three ends. First, in the 8th, they tried to draw with their last stone rather than take out the Alberta rocks that were sitting pretty close together in the back of the house. If those rocks are removed - or even pushed back so that the Sask rocks in the top of the house out count them, then Alberta can't get more than one point (Alberta had last rock then, and when the other team has last rock, your strategy is to limit them to one point).

Sask makes an error on the draw, and Alberta manages to gets two points that they had no business getting.

In the 9th, there are two Alberta rocks in the house (as well as two Sask rocks), and an Alberta guard rock in front of the house. Strategically, the most dangerous rock is the guard, as it can protect a rock later in the end, limiting what the opposing team can do. Instead of removing the guard, Sask eliminates the rocks in the house with a nice double take out.

However, later in the end Alberta gets a rock behind the cover of that guard, and it leads to back and forth draws, and then a steal of 1 by Alberta to tie the game.

Then in the 10th end, rather than keeping a clean sheet, which would be a good strategy if you only need 1 point and have last rock, they leave a number of rocks in play. Nevertheless, they have the opportunity to hit and stick for a single point and the win. However, their last rock picks on something on the ice and sails past Alberta's shot rock, failing to remove it, so Alberta counts 1 and wins the game.

The Saskatchewan rink was up 6-3 after 5 ends of a 10 end game, and should have come out on top. But they were outscored 5-1 the rest of the way, and lost 8-7, despite having last rock for most of the second half of the game.

Then today Sask is playing Ontario in the semi-final game. Again in the 10th end down one point, when they need to score 1 to tie and 2 to win, Sask allow a number of rocks to be in play and it's only with a great shot on their last throw that they get the necessary point to force an extra end.

In that end, Ontario plays a more conventional, lower risk strategy, by keeping the house pretty clean of rocks (e.g., hitting guards rocks in front of the house), and with their last rock they make an easy draw into the house for a point and the win.

And Saskatchewan goes home. Hopefully, they'll realize what they did wrong, and get it right next time. But they've been here before, more than once in fact, and usually there's only so many opportunities to get a break through victory.

Sadly, Saskatchewan didn't get one this year.

Sexy Beast

Watched the film Sexy Beast last night. Very interesting. It's a robbery flick, where a guy who's retired to sunny Spain is asked come back to London to do one more job. Maybe it's inaccurate to call it a robbery flick, because the focus of it is more on getting the guy to do the job than the job itself.

Ray Winstone plays the guy who's asked to come out of retirement by Ben Kingsley, who's playing a character with the moral opposite of the Gandhi role that made him famous. Even before Kingsley arrives in Spain, the knowledge that he's coming is enough to ramp up the tension between Winstone, his wife and the couple they pal around with in Spain, who are all familiar with how brutal Kingsley's character is.

But Kingsley isn't the head bad guy - his character's too much of aloose canon for that. No the head bad guy is Ian McShane, who I first enjoyed in the Lovejoy tv series and has more recently found notoriety in Deadwood.

The robbery itself actually stretches the limit of plausibility to me, but it's not really the point of the film. It's more about interplay between the three characters played by Winstone, Kingsley and to lesser extent McShane (because he has less screen time), and how the past can haunt you and how in particular Winstone is going to deal with these characters from his criminal past that he'd really rather just say no to.

But sometimes saying no is a very difficult thing to do.

Things done in ire

I was on the Air Canada site trying to book a flight to go overseas for a wedding in June, when it comes along to me signing in with my Aeroplan number and password. I'm not sure when I'd last signed in, so there's no way I can come up with my password. Thus, I click the old "Forgot/Need New Password?" button. 

In going through the process of getting a new password it asks me the prompt question that I'd put in when I set up my last password. The question I put in was: "What is the most fucking annoying website for travel miles?" 

That's what comes up as the prompt for me to login. I'm not kidding. 

Clearly, no one edits the prompt questions people put into the website. I must have been really angry when I'd set the password up the last time, and trying to navigate around the Aeroplan website this evening I got the sense of why that might have been. 

River skating

I went skating today on Winnipeg's River Trail. It was the first time I'd been skating in, umm, well, I'm not sure exactly. A long time. 10 years? Something like that.

It's the longest naturally frozen skating trail in the world. No, really. It is.

I went for about 5 miles maybe. I went from near my place to one end of it - the end on the Assiniboine River, not the Red River - and back and then a bit farther, as the river loops around my neighborhood, so going past where I started didn't put me any farther away from home than if I'd stopped where I started.

It was a good time. Interesting to see houses from the backside rather than the front side. There are some very nice homes along the river, and it was interesting to see how some of them have little (and some not so little) buildings along the river. Guest houses, perhaps. And at least one of those guest houses was bigger than some of my friend's places.

It was a pleasant skate, although much more so when I was going with the wind. That was the return leg of my journey, and I was happy about that. Skating with the wind - or without the wind in your face - was almost like skating downhill.

I'm not a great skater. One guy on fancy speed skates went speeding by me. Three times. But I didn't fall down, not even when I tried some cross overs. Didn't try an backwards skating, as there's not really the space for it. The trail's not really wide, so going backwards in my not so skilled manner might lead to some traffic problems.

But all in all, a good time.